Date: 28th Mar 2024
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EVERYONE COUNTS AT RAINFORD

Date: 26th May 2016

A Paul Edwards copyright exclusive for L&DCC Official Website.

Promoted side enjoying surprise start

Paul Farrar has this idea. He reckons that if eleven players rock up for a game of cricket on a Saturday afternoon, it’s a pretty good idea if all eleven do something. Quaint, isn’t it? Old fashioned, maybe? Unrealistic, surely, in a division as cut-throat as the MI Dental Liverpool Competition’s Premier League?
 
Yet the thing is that it’s working for Rainford, the team Farrar leads. Three wins in five games, including victories at New Brighton and Northern have left the promoted club sitting rather proudly in fourth place.
 
It probably should be made clear early on that Farrar aims to involve his players rather than insisting upon it . It’s a guideline rather than an inflexible principle. When Joe Noctor was whacking New Brighton’s attack round Rake Lane during his match-winning innings of 132 on the opening day of the season, nobody was thinking it was time someone else had a hit.
 
Yet the point is that Saad Khan, John Dotters and Farrar himself all played useful supporting innings which helped Noctor bring home the bread. Other cricketers took responsibility and that is a key part of Farrar’s philosophy of captaincy as he seeks to build a team capable of mixing it with some of the best club teams in Britain.
 
‘The big thing that we look to do as a group is ensure that everybody takes some responsibility,’ he said. ‘Each game that we have won has not been reliant on one person, it’s been the whole group. Yes, it was Joe in the first week but it was Matthew Bailey who got runs against Birkenhead Park,  and then myself and John Dotters got runs against Northern. It’s a matter of taking responsibility and seeing where we go.”
 
Well, if Rainford keep on winning three games in every five, they’ll breeze into next year’s Lancashire Cup draw and probably finish somewhere in the top three or four places in the ECB Premier League table. Farrar knows this quite well but he is taking a relaxed view of it all.
 
‘The younger lads have kicked on a bit from last year and everyone seems to be enjoying their cricket,’ he said. ‘The hope is that playing the same way we did last year can do well for us this year.’
 
And it is doing very nicely, so far. On Saturday Rainford chased down just over 200 to beat Northern without anyone getting to fifty. Against Formby on Saturday, there is every chance that Farrar will use six bowlers. After all, he’s done that in every league game so far.   
 
‘We pride ourselves on having eleven players who are actually playing,’ Farrar said. ‘They’re in for a reason, in for a role. Everyone in the side can bat, so we’re confident about every game into which we go. We know we’re going to win some and lose some.’
 
The Farrar way has also found favour with Rainford’s South African professional, Bokang Mosena, a cricketer who, as his skipper admits, is in the process of getting used to the Liverpool Competition.
 
‘Bokang is relaxed and good around the group,’ said Farrar. ‘He wants to get involved as much as he can, whether in training or in games. He’s had experience and he’s played first-class cricket. But the one thing we learned when Pravin Tambe was injured is that we don’t like to rely on one person, whoever it is.
 
‘We’ve brought in an overseas to help us win games of cricket but the last thing you want to be doing is turning up on a weekend and not playing because the overseas is doing everything.
 
‘If Bokang happens to get a hundred and takes five wickets, of course, we’ll be over the moon for him but the key for us is to stick together as a group and keep working hard.’
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